I just went to get my (overdue) haircut at the hair salon, deep in that hardcore-Democrat lair that goes by the name of Cook (“Crook”) County, Illinois. The woman who has cut may hair for the past 20+ years works in a working-class hair salon that tends to employ lower-middle class women, many single, and a few (mostly gay) men. I would generally characterize them as pro-labor union, conservative lifestyle-but-religiously Democrat voters who stay marginally aware of political issues. They tend to be very suspicious of business people and wealthy people. The woman who cuts my hair has known me for a very long time and we have kept up with each others families as our kids grew up. So, at this point in time, we have pretty much lost any pretenses in the wide open discussions that we’ve had over the years. Often, we disagree but we always have great discussions. Our standing joke is that, before every election, I tell her that she is a true Republican in her personal and family values but that she just can’t help herself from voting Democrat.

This time, she brought up to me that she had not watched the debate this week but that, the day after, the overwhelming sentiment at the hair salon was that Romney wiped the floor with Obama. I was shocked. But, how many of them would have supported Obama to begin with, I asked. “All of them”. I asked her how many of them would actually vote for Romney now, based on that debate, however. Her reply, “all of them!” She, too, will vote for a Republican President for the first time in her life. I asked her why. Her response, “I would have been willing to give Obama another chance if he had just kept things the same. But he has caused so much damage, I just can’t do that this time.”

Somehow, I suspect that she and her coworkers haven’t shown up yet in the polling statistics, yet.

So why would the Obama administration overtly lie about what transpired in Libya?

Because, on the anniversary of 9/11, Al Qaeda won a “battle” and this administration could only pretend otherwise.

What most of the pundit media seems to have missed, including the inestimable Mark Steyn and John Bolton, is that it isn’t just that fact that the Obama Administration’s foreign policy has failed but that they have effectively reversed years of successes against our declared enemies won through blood, sweat and tears. Under George Bush, we vowed to hunt Al Qaeda down to the ends of the earth. There would be no rock or cave in the world under or in which they could hid from us. We would find them and we did find them. In appreciated, GW Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were excoriated. Today, after 3-1/2 years of Obama’s foreign policy delusions, Al Qaeda has been resurgent and, on September 11th, they scored an important “victory”.

I don’t blame Obama and his acolytes. They are what they are. I do blame those people who voted them in that actually believed, after 9/11, that we could simply pretend our enemies away with fluffy speeches, acquiescence to their demands and the freeing of Al Qaeda prisoners. Today our enemies are resurgent and, with the help of the Obama administration, empowered. Not just our enemies in the Middle East, but those in the Pacific as well.

It looks like those people who spent the first decade braying “no more war!” have pretty much guaranteed that we will face war for decades to come. Whether we have the collective national will to survive, crush our enemies and win, only time and events will tell.

The Obama administration couldn’t tell the truth. To do so would require that they admit that the GW Bush Administration was right and that they were horribly, horribly wrong.

Whilst driving the upper Mississippi valley recently with my brilliant spouse, she asked me the most trenchant question of this election season: can anyone think of a single foreign or domestic program enacted by Barack Obama that has been successful…at least, from the perspective of the people of the United States?

So, will Obama follow Sarah Palin’s advice and ask Hillary to be his running mate? Hmmm…consider this Hillary-ous political ad that disproves once and for all the ridiculous notion that conservatives do not have a sense of humor.

The news today that a “Gay Marriage” advocate attacked the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., shooting a security guard in the process, got me to pondering this question: has any act of political violence in the U.S. ever been associated with conservatives or Republicans?

Sometime ago, I posted a comment that referenced data that suggested a link between La Nina /El Nino events and underwater volcanic activity.

Basically, these volcanic events have to do with the puzzling appearance and disappearance of hot water masses in the Pacific Ocean that affect the flow of currents and, consequently, air masses that affect our global climate. The Pacific Ocean is rimmed by highly active tectonic ridges and volcanoes. This model certainly makes more sense than to claim that parts-per-million changes in the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere have massive changes on ocean water temperatures. Among other events, recent major droughts in the southern U.S. and Brazil and limited monsoon activity in southern Asia have been linked to La Nina activity.

Here is the article that I referenced:

http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/18084

This is interesting because of the recent upsurges in tsunami and earthquake-generating tectonic activity around the Pacific Rim’s “Ring of Fire”. Shifting tectonic plates (an idea bred by skeptics in 1912 that only gained currency in the 1970s) would be expected to generate more volcanic activity.

And here, from the BBC, comes a story that suggests an unusual degree of recent submerged volcanic activity creating “weird”, hitherto unrecorded effects. Pumice is a stone, created by volcanic activity, that actually floats.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19207810

Incidentally, at a meeting that I attended this spring, a climatologist predicted that the La Nina events linked to the hot summer and drought experienced in the southwest and south-central parts of the U.S. would end by late-July as an El Nino event began to develop. He was right on the money. The rains of August have returned to the Midwest.

Just recently, I happened to drive through the southern end of the Bakken Field in North Dakota on my way to Montana. I can tell you that an oil boom in the making is absolutely awesome to behold! There is black gold in them thar hills!

The I-94 freeway was a solid line of trucks ferrying equipment to the oil fields. Low-level hotel and motel rooms are booked 4 years out and cost in the upper $-100s per night. Everywhere over North Dakota’s (very attractive, in my view) rolling western plains you see oil storage tanks and pumps blending (yes, blending…they are not ugly or obtrusive) in the countryside. The crush of people from all over and construction in small-but-fast-growing towns like Dickinson and Williston is energizing. Oh, if I was young again…

I met a semi-retired petroleum engineer in Alberta that was working on the Canadian tar sands development. I asked him what he had heard regarding the size of the Bakken oil field. He indicated that, pessimistically, it contained 1x the reserves of Saudi Arabia, while the optimistic projection was 3x the Saudi oil reserves. Plus, there are all the other oil fields out there waiting to be developed (e.g., Western Colorado) and the natural gas fields scattered throughout the country.

Interestingly, he also told me that he thought the Obama administration made the right call on the Keystone Pipeline in that the forced redirection of the pipeline would be much more responsible (environmentally speaking), given the shallow ground water tables in Nebraska.

I don’t believe that this can be stopped. Cheap energy is at hand and it will change our country and the world.

DQ and Bookworm have started something here, between their recent posts on “thoughts for the day” and how to instill values in children.

I look at so many of the really nice kids that I meet in our neighborhood and in our church and they are, to put it simply, utterly, totally, hopelessly lost! Many of them have college degrees and still have no idea of what they want to do. They have no idea of how the world works. They are college graduates and they live at home. They wait for someone to help guide them (i.e., parents). Many of them are hopelessly in debt. I would have to conclude that our generation’s parents have failed them.

In a parenting seminar at our church, I mentioned that my wife and I often played “good cop, bad cop” roles, but that we always had each others’ back when it came to disciplining our children. One (really top-drawer) mother raising three really great kids piped up, “Why do I always have to be the bad cop? My husband is such a pushover”.

Recently, I asked my 20-something son, an already highly decorated soldier, why he thought that so many of his peers were in such straits. He thought about it and said, “because everything was just given to them”. Is that the whole story?

So, those of you with experience with kids as mentors or parents, what would your advice be to parents today, so that their children don’t end up so lost.

Let me start if off: tell your children that nobody owes them anything. Everything good that they enjoy in life is a gift.

Help! I sent someone (a committed Liberal) and article wherein noted anti-Jihadi crusader, Andrew McCarthy, made the charge that the U.S. was now funding Hamas through its aid program to the Palestinians. My Liberal friend posed that this is a pretty serious charge…can it be proved?

I’m stuck in the wilds of the northern Rockies for the next week with only intermittent Wifi. My friend makes a point…can this very serious charge be proven?

DQ – btw – you are truly doing a Herculean performance on this blog. My hat is doffed.

I am standing Hwy 2, passing through the Blackfoot “Res” in Montana. What I see before me doesn’t look like much, a scrubby field under low hills and Montana’s incredibly beautiful big sky.

Where I am standing is the former site of the Badger Creek Indian Agency, where the Blackfeet Indians gathered after their buffalo had been slaughtered and the government promised them food and support in exchange for having given up their independence and self reliance.

By the winter of 1883-1884, however, the government had really, really screwed up. The Indians’ own source of meat (buffalo, deer, elk) had been destroyed. Their limited crops had failed. Their limited livestock was depleted. They were running out of food.

Since 1881, Indian agent John Young’s repeated requests to the government for more food aid had been met with bureaucratic indifference. Frankly, the “government” didn’t care very much and there were budget constraints that had to be met.

Then, in the winter of 1883-1884, the inevitable happened: starvation came. By the time the world outside the reservation heard about it, one quarter of the population (600 Indians) had already starved to death. The surrounding Montana communities responded immediately, sending relief trains of emergency food, livestock and blankets to the Blackfeet survivors. The government, by contrast, did nothing. After the fact, they held hearings, absolved themselves of responsibility and, finally, blamed Indian Agent John Young for gross negligence.

This is a story to keep in mind for all those that believe that it is somehow a good idea to surrender their independence and self-reliance to a faceless entity called “government”. Whether it is welfare, social security, Medicare or Obamacare, I can guarantee this: the government will screw up through indifference and people will die. Not because government is “bad” or that the people in government are “bad”, but because people are people and government can never be better than our collective human nature. And, once stripped of our independence and self-reliance, there will be no recourse. We will not be able to rely upon surrounding communities to rush to our aid.

I would like to make the case that it is, not for any specific action that any specific media outlet has taken, but by its very nature.

In 1970, Alvin Toffler published his seminal work, Future Shock, in which he predicted that one of the big challenges that we would face in the here-and-now is an over-saturation of media-mediated information stimuli. I believe that he predicted this more accurately than even he imagined.

I propose that the most pernicious damage wrought by the media is the way that it amplifies the worst in human nature. Our Judeo-Christian heritage likes to emphasize the seven deadly sins destructive to our nature and our relationship with God, to whit: gluttony, greed, anger, envy, sloth, lust and pride.

We live in an unheard of access to wealth and information. It isn’t hard to see how our material cornucopia enables the sins of Gluttony and Greed. We are a society, as Dinesh Dsouza famously remarked, where even the poor can be fat. Sloth, well…we have a welfare state that does its utmost to protect our citizenry from the consequences of sloth, so naturally we have more of it. Anger? We enjoy a world of violent sports, video games and cinema and our media rewards demagogues for whipping-up resentments based on race or class. Flash mobs, anyone? What about Lust? Even small children have ready access to pornography in popular magazines, the cinema or from the internet…it’s being normalized. Envy? Messages that stoke peoples’ sense of entitlement to other peoples’ labor and possessions find a ready audience. The media constantly reminds us of how much “the other” has that we don’t.

The most deadly of sins, according to the ancients, is pride or vanity. It is pride that drives people to seek fame, be it by demanding the latest fashions, coloring their hair, decorating their bodies, performing on American Idol or filming themselves having sex or beating up innocent people. Pride or vanity is the craving to be noticed and acting out violence for the Videocam lense is vanity writ large.

This, as the ancients point out, has always been the case. Two hundred years ago, however, it was much harder for people to gain social approval for their worst human excesses or to get noticed for committing mass murder. First, it was hard to get the one’s primal pride messaged out beyond one’s immediate locale. Second, community involvement and trip-wire taboos imposed strict guidelines on and early intervention into aberrant human behavior. Third, when self-control failed, retribution tended to be swift.

Today, by contrast, people are encouraged by our media environment to act out (is there anything more narcissistic than “reality TV”?). We live in a Kardashian society where even young kids are encouraged to seek media fame.

People can now project their worst sinful excesses onto vaste audiences with minimal effort. Once having done so, they are guaranteed 24/7 news coverage, book rights, movie scripts and the protective umbrella of the modern justice system. Whoo-hoo! The Joker rules!

Holmes, like a string of mass murders before him, wanted fame. He wanted to be noticed. Because his pride got the best of him. Our media culture provided all the tools that he needed to amplified the worst consequences of his human nature. Take away our media-saturated environment and there would not be nearly the incentive.

So, what say you? How do we fix this?

“It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels” – St. Augustine of Hippo.

Years ago, the Bookworm Room took a leadership position in challenging man-made global warming dogma and I would comfortably assert that we have been winning the arguments. However, the battle is far from over.

Today’s Chicago Tribune posted a column published by two credentialed climate scientists from the U. of Illinois, attributing this winter’s warm winter conditions and tornado activity to man-made CO2 emissions in the atmosphere.

The warmer-than-normal weather this winter and early spring was the result of an extended Pacific Ocean-warming phenomenon called “La Nina”. This phenomenon has been linked to diverse weather conditions around the world, from severe drought conditions in our Southwest and Brazil, to warmer-than-normal winters in the upper Midwest to reduced monsoon activity in southern Asia. Warmer-than-normal winter and spring temperatures are also conducive to tornado formation when they clash and create turbulence with cold air from the winter jet stream.

Keep in mind that one of the paramount principles of scientific endeavor, routinely violated by man-made climate change proponents, is “Occam’s Razor”, which stipulates that you look at the simplest, most obvious explanations first!

So, let’s ask the question… are increasing levels of atmospheric CO2, present in concentrations measured in parts-per-million, responsible for massive warming events in the central Pacific? Does this sound like a reasonable explanation?

The best leading indicator of a La Nina event is not the amount of CO2 in the air, but subsurface water temperatures (i.e., below the ocean surface, not at the surface where CO2 would be absorbed from the air) around the Pacific Rim. The most likely cause for these temperature upwellings, supported by satellite and deep-sea surveyor data, is underwater volcanic activity, which we are only just beginning to understand. Bookworm aficionados are very well-read and aware, so they will recall reading that these past few years have been seismically active around the Pacific Rim. Undersea volcanos, like terrestrial volcanos, release huge amounts of heat, which must go somewhere. In water and in air, heat rises.

After La Nina ended this spring, we returned to cooler than normal temperatures in the Midwest and eastern U.S., which will probably persist through 2012, as a countervailing, cooling El Nino begins to form in the Pacific. In fact, the last 10 years have seen a consistent, measurable period of global cooling, not heating, even as atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased.

In addition, the pioneering work of Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark, a man who’s name may one day rank in the Astronomer’s pantheon with Galileo and Copernicus, has laid out testable theories on how solar activity affects cloud cover, precipitation and global temperatures that are completely changing perceptions regarding climate change and, frankly, render the effects of CO2 (which, in the end, is just an insignificant greenhouse gas when compared to water) on climate as irrelevant. Thus far, the tests of his theories are coming out very positive and serve to explain both observed climate warming and cooling cycles.

The facade of man-made global warming is crumbling, but far too many credentialed “scientists” have vested their reputations and research budgets in man-made global warming postulations for them to give up lightly. So, they double down because they have to. Unfortunately, too many citizens will be fooled by their credentials to question their premises.

Given the credentials of the authors of this Chicago Tribune column, they in all likelihood knew all of this. They just didn’t feel that the Chicago Tribune’s readers should know about this details, because it doesn’t happen to fit their ideological meme. So, they misdirect.

DQ raise very important points about the power of language. The examples of “austerity” and “stimulus” certainly need to be addressed. But, let me address another problematic term: “government spending”. Far too many people seem to equate government spending (syn. taxes, benefits, welfare, rebates, investments, stimuli, grants, outlays, funding, etc.) with “free” money.

All these terms that reference government spending also generate warm fuzzies with large portions of the population that cannot or will not equate such activities with government expropriation of the labor, sweat, money and intellectual capital of “other” people without their express permission.

Thus, I would like to propose a new word, “opuem”, an acronym for “Other People’s Unfairly Expropriated Money”.

It’s a far more efficient use of language to distill so many different terms into a single, comprehensive concept and thereby change the nature of public discourse in very positive, enlightening ways, as for example:

“The Democrat Congress, with the support of the President, voted to drastically increase opuem for dispersal to favored but potentially restless constituencies in order to keep them quiet, loyal and dependent. The Republican opposition voiced its concerns that there is far too much demand for opuem by society today, and that excessive opuem dependency will prove detrimental to economic productivity and societal well-being.”

This term, opuem, should not to be confused with a similar term, “hopium”, conceived by Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass as a descriptor for current White House emanations.

We recognize the narcissism of our Commander-in-Chief. It has been the subject of many an article by his detractors. Here, for example, is a harsh assessment of the depth of his pathological disorder by a purported MD psychiatrist (I say “purported”, because the identity of the author is hidden and therefore cannot be verified):

I don’t know enough to properly vet this article from a medical or psychiatric point of view, but enough rings true to be truly worried. We should all worry and pray for the health and well-being of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, for example, who was kicked out of the U.S. embassy in violation of a long history of American embassies providing sanctuary to human rights activists. Why?

The article cited above provides a clue:

Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help them to reach their personal objective. They are focused on one thing alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not help them is beneath them and does not deserve their attention.

If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he has no interest in it. The “present” vote is a safe vote. No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Those issues are unworthy by their very nature because they are not about him.

Sadly, Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng serves no purpose for the agenda of our narcissist in chief. He and his family, therefore, are dispensable.

In ancient Greece, narcissism was the handmaiden of hubris. It was a punishable crime, as the Greeks recognized that hubris inevitably led to destruction by nemesis. The author of the linked article worries that, should Obama be repudiated by the American people, nemesis will express itself through a backlash against African Americans, the rise of white supremacists and race wars. I disagree. I believe that we, as a people, are well beyond that.

What we do need to worry about is that a failing Obama, faced with the repudiation of his narcissistic world view by his country, will do things far more drastic to wreak revenge upon his detractors and cement his self image as the man who changed the world. Think a moment about the horrific actions of another pathological narcissist cited in the article, Jim Jones, for example.

I believe that there is a good chance that, despite widespread sabotage of the American electoral system by the Democrats, that Romney will win. What we really need to worry about is the inevitable arrival of nemesis. Let’s hope that our country’s systems of checks and balances, designed by our Founding Fathers, hold fast.

In the meantime, the rest of the world and its human rights activists have good cause to be worried. We live in dangerous times.